Embrace Life

 Today is once again National Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. It's a day where we celebrate life created in the image of God! All human life is worthy of respect. It's set aside by its Creator, for a purpose, and it should be considered extremely important and highly valued.

Unfortunately, not everyone acknowledges that fact and it has become an extremely divisive subject in our nation. Recently billboards proclaiming life as sacred were vandalized... So I know many would rather not discuss this matter - but I have no choice but to speak up. This is a spiritual issue, and I have to publicly affirm…

I. Human life is sacred!

Many people have different views on the subject of the sanctity of human life. But the only opinion concerning human life that I'm really interested in is the Creator of human life. Let's turn to a hopefully familiar passage from Genesis 1:27-28 (NIV)...

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (28) God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

I've publicly read that scripture many times over the past few years and I will continue to preach it again and again. God says human life is special! We were created to reflect God's glory! We were created in God's image! We can live, love, talk, think, reason and have fellowship with our Creator. God placed human beings on earth to represent His sovereignty and to rule over all that He had made. And because of our unique place in creation - we have a responsibility, we are called to…

A. Protect human life

Our intrinsic value comes from God, not from what we can achieve, or do, or produce, or earn. Under the Old Testament Law, there was an extreme penalty for even accidentally taking the life of an unborn child. Modern views may have changed, but I don't believe the way that God feels about it has. Now, it's not my job to judge – but to speak the truth.

When people were asked why they decided to have an abortion, 66% said they couldn't afford the child; 75% said that it would interfere with their lives, and 95% said it was for reasons of convenience. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop stated, "In thirty-five years of medicine I have never seen one case where abortion was necessary to save a mother's life."

There are those who have different views concerning the sanctity of human life from what is explained in scripture. And we understand that those people are not our enemies. Many will even say that they agree that fewer abortions would be preferable, so is it so unreasonable to ask for compromise?

- If more than a million annual U.S. abortions - if that number is unacceptable, what number is acceptable? Would it be okay if we just ended the life of 500,000 unborn children? What about 250,000? What number would be an acceptable compromise to God?

And then there's the question of when does human life really begin? Can't we compromise on our views there…? I'd like to look again at a passage we've read …

Psalms 139:13-16 (NIV)

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. (14) I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (15) My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, (16) your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

David didn't have any modern medical knowledge about cellular biology or genetics when he wrote that... David didn't have access to fetal heart monitors or advanced sonograms. But David did have a close personal relationship with God. He was called a man after God's own heart. David understood that the work of God in his life extended all the way back to even before he was in his mother's womb. David understood the structure and very meaning of a person's life was established from the beginning, in the womb, by God.

Men try to establish through medical knowledge just when a person becomes a person. And as science catches up with God, Dr's have to push their opinions back earlier and earlier. Today we're told that unborn children have detectable heartbeats at just 18 days. God doesn't have to wait for us to acknowledge a child's existence before it's actually a child.

Now, I have to acknowledge that this is a very personal issue for some. The pain that abortion has inflicted on women and children and families is very real. And it's also surrounded by a lot of guilt. I've not spoken to a woman who's had an abortion who didn't have some feelings of regret. I want to remind us…

B. No one can change the past

What's done is done. However, the pain and guilt may continue. But it doesn't have to be that way forever. We carry guilt based on our perception of how big or little a given sin is. But that's not really how God sees sin; and there's nothing 'too big' for God to handle. 'Big sins' separate us from God, and 'little sins' separate us from God. But God is not as much interested in your past as He is your future. Neither you, nor I, deserve God's forgiveness. But God wasn't content with that.

1 John 1:7-9 (NIV)

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. (8) If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. (9) If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

It doesn't say that if you do enough good to make up for all of the bad in your life that God will then forgive you. You see, we're usually the ones who can't seem to forgive ourselves – but that's not the way it works with God. We can't change the past, but we can gain complete forgiveness in Jesus! God's answer to sin is Jesus! Forgiveness is only found in Jesus! In the New Testament, Peter told a crowd the only way to remove their guilt from nailing Jesus to a cross - he said this in Acts 2:38-39 (NIV)...

Peter replied, "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (39) The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off - for all whom the Lord our God will call."

They could only find forgiveness for crucifying Jesus in the name of Jesus. When it comes to forgiveness of sin, it's all about Jesus! Without Jesus, every one of us is lost. With Jesus – we don't have to carry the guilt and the burden of our sin anymore. So what should we do...

II. In light of the truth?

There are many in the medical field today who recommend terminating a pregnancy if it's found that a baby might have serious medical issues. But does human life find its value in its physical perfection? My daughter Josie was born with a minor congenital defect that had to be surgically corrected a few years after she was born. If it would have been more serious, would she no longer have been made in the image of God? How flawed is acceptable – and where do we draw the line? We don't draw the line - The Creator does.

Recently, a speech was given at the American Principles Project Foundation Christmas Banquet. I felt compelled to share some extended excerpts from that speech...

[To view the full speech, click here.]

"(Abortion has...) never been very popular to talk about... Abortion is still the defining issue of our time, and it is still the wall that separates one side... from the other. It's a wall that's built with the bodies of 60 million dead babies... Can you point to something that has a... greater death toll than that? - You can't. Not one single genocide in the whole history of the world, not one single plague, not anything. The death toll is staggering; greater than anything the world's ever seen. These victims, these children have been killed, legally, by human hands in a little building in your local shopping mall that you drive by on your way to work or to run errands. And they've been killed at the behest of their own parents with the help of 'so-called doctors', facilitated by the government. Every kind of person that children are supposed to rely on to protect them, all of those people have turned against them to destroy them.

"The most innocent of all people are children, and they're the precise ones that have been targeted for extermination. They've harmed no one... If we can't see the value and worth of a child, then who can we see it in? ... I remain confounded by the sorts of people who would look at an unborn child and see only a 'clump of cells'. - 'Clump of cells'? I mean we're all 'clumps of cells'. ... But can you really not see the miracle in this life? Can you really not see the beauty of this life, that you call a 'clump of cells'? Can you really not see the tragedy in destroying it?

"And it's a tragedy that's compounded three-fold.....We have to remember, the miraculous thing about conception, that moment when a new life comes into being - what's so mystical and beautiful about it is... it's not just one life being created, but three. There's the child, a precious vulnerable new life, plucked by God out of eternity and sent here to begin its earthly existence. Then there's the woman who goes from being a woman, to being a mother. She herself is created in this moment. It's a moment of becoming, she becomes something. She's born alongside her child and the same is true of the man. He goes from being just a man to being a father.

"But the reality is, that while three lives are created at conception - only one is killed through abortion. The child is gone from the Earth forever, never to be seen again in this world. The mother and father are still who they became, despite what they're told. They don't go back to being just a woman and a man. She's still a mother, he's still a father, they are still parents, but now they're the parents... of a dead child.

"There's no way to get around the fundamental fact that some (wish to) deny... the personhood of the unborn. The pro abortion advocate will try to say that the child's not a person because he's still developing, and he's entirely dependent on his mother for survival. And this means, he'll say, that the baby lacks some kind of moral standing. ...This view that personhood is acquired by degree, and that it's forfeit if you're dependent on someone else for survival, clearly implicates more than just the unborn. It would seem that the sick, the infirm, the disabled, the elderly, all get caught up in this 'de-personing' net.

"By this line of reasoning, all of these people have at a minimum slightly less personhood, if personhood is on a spectrum... Then by this logic we have 'de-personed' many categories of persons. Which is a feature, not a bug, of pro-abortion logic. ...They intend to whittle away at both ends of life, the young and the old. - 'Un-person' one subset after another, until 'the right to life' has been extinguished for all, but the privileged few.

"The only other option... is that personhood and its attending moral rights and dignity is inherent to all living humans. And if something is inherent, that means it belongs to the essential nature of a thing. The idea that our human dignity, our personhood, belongs to our essential nature and cannot be lost or diminished is an idea that lies at the very foundation of this country; at the foundation of any notion of human rights. You cannot have human rights if you don't first have...the idea that human beings have inherent dignity.

"And this is an idea...that everybody in America pretends to believe, most of the time. There's not a single person...or very few anyway, who would reject the notion of human rights. They all accept it. Well guess what? Human rights, that's a doctrine, that's not science. That's not something we found in a science book, that's a religious doctrine - human rights.

"And part of that doctrine, stems from this idea about the value of a human, and if you're taking value away...from one set of human beings you're taking it away from everybody. If an unborn baby does not have inherent value, then human value is not permanent... and thus, if he does not have inherent value, then neither do you. You cannot gain inherent value. You either have it from the first moment of existence or you never do - ever. Those are the only options that make any sense.

"Now the personhood argument for abortion is actually even worse than it sounds at first. It's so bad that even if it were true, it would do almost nothing to prove the pro-abortion case - because the personhood argument for abortion is a syllogism with a missing premise. It seems to go like this - 'premise one - an unborn baby is not a person, it's merely a 'potential person', conclusion - therefore, we can kill him.'

"Even if I let you make the first logical leap to say the unborn child is not a person, but a 'potential person' - you still have an even bigger leap you have to make ... you need to now prove that it's okay to kill the 'potential person'. And I don't see how you make that case, because if I agree it's a 'potential person', for the sake of argument, it would seem to me to be the most valuable 'non-person thing' on the planet!

"It would seem to be then, at worst, the second most valuable thing next to a person, and I don't see why it would be 'okay' to kill the second best thing. It would still be more valuable than say, a sea turtle egg and sea turtle eggs are federally protected. Now to be clear again, I don't even for a moment buy the idea that an unborn person is just a potential person. I reject it outright on scientific, moral, scriptural, and logical grounds. I'm just trying to establish that the argument doesn't even work on its own premise.

"This is the truth that cannot be escaped - abortion is the intentional destruction of innocent human life. And intentionally destroying innocent human life is always wrong - period." And the speaker explained this is not just a political issue or about winning or losing elections, he continued... (But even if it was...) "it wouldn't change my view on the topic; it wouldn't change how I talk about it. I would not compromise on abortion even if it really did mean losing every election from now till Kingdom come. And the reason is simple - it is, ...to accept child murder is to forfeit your soul.

"If we are really a country where child murder is so fundamentally popular that it's impossible to win by opposing it, then we're not a country worth saving anymore. We deserve at that point whatever destruction comes our way. God will strike us down for our sins and I couldn't stand in the way of that if I wanted to... I'll never accept abortion. I'll never compromise on it. I won't give up any ground, not one inch, nothing. All abortion is wrong, always. It's never okay to kill an innocent human being, ever, under any circumstance, ever. It is always our obligation to protect the innocent, especially our children. There are no exceptions, none, period, ever.

"But finally, the good news ... Winning is our destiny, because the truth always prevails in the end, always. If you're a Christian, you have an advantage, because you have the book and you can skip to the spoilers at the end of the book, and you can see how it ends. And so we know that we win, we stand in the truth, when no one else will, for that reason... We speak for those who cannot speak. We say what must be said, and we do what must be done."

So What?

Submitting to God is easy - when God agrees exactly with me on what I believe. Submitting to God is easy when it doesn't require me to change at all. The hard part comes in when any of my beliefs come into conflict with what God says. If I want to follow Jesus, I have to change and bring my thinking into line with His.

A lot of people in this world aren't really interested in changing their lives or way of thinking. They want God's blessing, but they don't want His opinion. There are some things in the Bible that we may not honestly fully understand. But there are other things we can't misunderstand. We can't ignore how God clearly feels about the sanctity of human life. Embrace life!